Syrians are starting to uncover mass graves across the country, shedding light on the magnitude of atrocities committed during the brutal rule of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad.
More than two weeks after Assad fled Syria and his regime collapsed, scores of Syrian families still have no answer about what happened to their loved ones following their detention by Assad’s secret police.
Hundreds of thousands of bodies of people “tortured to death by the Assad regime” could be buried in a mass grave east of Damascus, according to Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the US-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), an anti-Assad advocacy group.
After years of work to expose mass graves, Moustafa told CNN he’s finally been able visit suspected sites after Assad’s fall.
The alleged mass grave site in the city of Qutayfah, about 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Damascus, is marked by trenches 6-7 meters (19-23 feet) deep, 3-4 meters wide, and 50-150 meters long, according to SETF.
Moustafa said gravediggers who worked at the site had told him that, “four tractor trailer trucks, each carrying over 150 bodies in each, came twice a week from 2012 until 2018.” That would amount to hundreds of thousands of bodies, he told CNN.
“The bulldozer excavator driver described how intelligence officers forced workers to use the bulldozer to flatten and compress the bodies to make them fit and easier to bury before digging the next line/trench,” Moustafa said.
On Monday, reports emerged of more than 20 bodies found in a mass grave north of Izraa in Daraa governorate, southern Syria.
Videos from the Agence France-Presse news agency show men digging and pulling bones from the dirt. Another shows two rows of covered bodies lying on the ground and a bulldozer gently trying to dig the top layer of the soil.
Some 150,000 people in Syria are unaccounted for, most of whom were kidnapped or detained by the Assad regime or its affiliates, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). CNN cannot independently verify this number.
Bodies identified by numbers
In 2020, a man known as “the Gravedigger” told a German court he was recruited by the Assad regime to bury hundreds of bodies in mass graves, according to the ICMP.
The bodies were those of Syrians from various detention centers, the witness told a trial of former Syrian intelligence officers. The man said that, along with others, he would escort multiple trucks, “loaded with anywhere between 300-700 corpses to mass graves in Qatayfah north of Damascus and al-Najha to the south four times a week. The bodies could only be identified by the numbers etched on their chests or foreheads and exhibited severe signs of torture and mutilation,” according to ICMP.
SETF’s Moustafa said he is aware of at least eight mass grave sites in Syria. He also urged international experts to come to the country to help with the process of exhuming and identifying bodies.
Jenifer Fenton, the spokesperson for the United Nations’ special envoy to Syria, said last week that related documentation to detention site and mass graves “must be secured to aid families in their search for justice and accountability.”
“We must prioritize accounting for the missing, ensuring the families receive the clarity and recognition they desperately need,” she said in a press briefing.
One of those family members is Hazem Dakel from Idlib, who now lives in Sweden.
Dakel said his uncle Najeeb was arrested in 2012 and it was later confirmed by the family as having been killed. His brother Amer was detained the following year, he said. Former detainees at the notorious Saydnaya prison near Damascus said Amer had disappeared in mid-April 2015 after being tortured there. But the regime never acknowledged his death.
The family is now “certain” Amer died under torture in Saydnaya, Dakel posted on Facebook.
Amid the celebrations of Assad’s fall there’s also been great sadness among families of those who went missing.
“They are mourning their children,” Dakel said. “Yes, the regime fell after resistance and struggle, but there was sorrow – like, where are our children?”
Eyad Kourdi and Raja Razek contributed to this report.
